Have we all lost our minds? Maybe I'm late on this, but I never actually clicked this link until today. It's an advertisement for these necklaces I've been seeing on ballplayers for awhile. The ones that look like they'd really get in your way if you were trying to play baseball while wearing one.

Turns out these things aren't just necklaces, but maaa-gic rings! They "...stabilize the electrical current flowing through your body, making you feel more relaxed..."

Huh?

So, they're selling tinfoil hats to sane people, basically.

Look, I respect people's totally psycho beliefs. But I'm telling you, you make half of these things out of titanium, and the other half out of plastic and paint them the same color, and I guarantee no one can tell the difference. They've actually got David Ortiz giving a testimonial, which, surprisingly, sounds nothing like the way he actually speaks. And then they've got a golfer saying how it helps him "relax." Yeah, those guys must be ready to drop after all that standing around and chatting with other guys who are also white.

Between what the golfer said and what Ortiz said about this wacky necklace helping him come through in the clutch, it's almost like they're passing it off as some kind of anti-choke ring. An anti-choker, if you will. Maybe A-Rod needs one of these to help him at crunch time.

I know somebody's gonna tell me, "Titanium actually does have a chemical bla bla bla..." And maybe it does. But, again, my view is that all you have to do is TELL someone that the necklace (or the holy water, or the tin foil hat, or the lines in your palm) has special powers, and if they choose to believe, then it will work for them.

This takes me back to that whole thing about "believing."

You may read the above and say, "But A Red Sox Fan In Et Cetera, you said that you think you can make the Red Sox continue to do well by bouncing your knee at a certain rate when seeing that they started doing well only when you started bouncing the knee."

Yeah, that's true. I guess since I don't have a religion, that stuff is all I've got. But my (prevent) defense of it is that I'm a logical person, and I only do what seems logical to me. If the Red Sox are rallying, and then someone walks into the room, and the rally immediately ends, well, it's just gonna have to be their fault. You didn't see me haphazardly walking from room to room right at a point when everything was going just fine with me in a stationary position.

Butterfly effect and being at the game (to cheer, which CAN help the home team) aside, that's really all I can do when rooting for the Sox. Without that, rooting is just sitting there and waiting to see what happens. Maybe it's all the baseball video games, Strat-o-matic, Pursue the Pennant, and made-up dice rolling games I grew up with that make me feel like I'm actually responsible, if only a little tiny bit, for what's going on out on the field, no matter how many hundreds of miles away I am from it.

I do like to do weird stuff, like see if I can see the image of a ghost in a photograph, and stuff like that. And I'll let someone do my Tarot, you know, for fun. And me and my sister used to play with the Ouija board (it told me I'd marry Agatha Cratts one day--I still think my sister was purposely moving it, and when I said, Hey, you're just making it say Agatha Christie!, she changed it to Cratts). But I wouldn't pay money for this stuff or let it rule my life. I just do what I feel naturally. So when I see people believing the Bible, I say, Why do you think this book, clearly written by a human, is absolute truth? It's just someone's opinion. Same with every other religion, and basically any philosophy in the world. But, ironically enough, that's just my opinion. (But it's true. Shhhhhh.)

Some people need religion, so I've heard. While I think that's an outright excuse, I do think that they think it's true. So if that works for them, great. But wait, isn't the electrical current thing anti-religious? Once again, I find myself totally confused. How about this--everybody just do what you gotta do, and don't hurt anybody else. (That includes stealing their money in exchange for a piece of titanium. You're giving Bob Ross' titanium white a bad name.) Hey! My dad used to say that Bob Ross was god. (And if you've watched him paint, or should I say "create," you know what my dad meant.) So I get it now. Bob, titanium, god...it was a sign from Ross.

Everything is clear now. Maybe this necklace isn't a mistake--just a happy accident.